Nate Parker Quotes

Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?

It's hard to love yourself when you've been told your whole life that there is something wrong with you - when you are called dirty because of your skin color.

Me being dark-skinned, that was like a big thing. Growing up, I hated myself. It was, like, weird. Kids are cruel.

Racism built me into a person that was set up to be self-destructive.

I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team.

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

I grew up hearing, 'You're pretty for a black girl,' 'You speak well for a black girl...' I was really bookish. I was reading all of the time. I had big glasses.

I grew up thinking I was inferior to white-skinned people. And as a child if you are conditioned like this, it becomes a part of your upbringing that you believe that probably because I look like this, I won't get anywhere in life.

I'm very light, so some people don't really know that I'm black. I've been in situations where people will say something kind of racist, and I'll step in, and they'll be like, 'Oh, well, you're light.' That still doesn't cut it, buddy.

That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned.

When I was young, to have a big nose, big lips or dark skin was the worst. You were the wretched.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

Hey, I may loathe myself, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm Jewish.

There is more racial prejudice in India than anywhere else in the world.

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

And I ask why am I black, they say I was born in sin, and shamed inequity. One of the main songs we used to sing in church makes me sick, 'love wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

I've always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I've loved playing with it. People act as though it isn't an issue, but it's a recurring theme in our lives globally.

There's a lot more hypocrisy than before. Racism has gone back underground.

I'm Armenian, but I'm very fair and I look white... I would always get such hate about it.